Practo.com – Sequoia Capital infuses funds

Practo.com owned by Practo Technologies has received fresh funds from Sequoia Capital. The company is a technology firm enhances patient experience stepped up with the clinics across India with simple and advanced technology products.

Practo.com the company’s platform offers patients search for a doctor and fix up an appointment. The company has developed an intelligent, impartial and organic algorithm for ranking healthcare providers and practice. It is called Practo Ranking Algorithm (PRA) based on three factors such as relevance, appointment experience and preference.

In terms of relevance, the algorithm considers locations are manually verified for accuracy and reliable. For better patient experience, listings of doctors will also be provided in the neighbourhood too. The algorithm further categorize the doctor based on locations and factors of extra specialization.

The appointment experience is determining factor based on patients who use the application. The algorithm provides information analyzing booking experience, waiting time, Doctor Availability and Patient feedback. This information is vital and important for determination of ranking.

Another algorithm called preference will play a crucial role in determining the popularity of a doctor. Based on user interest and views that has been generated for that particular doctor is determined on the basis of appointments based in last 30 days. Further the affiliations and specializations of the doctor along with achievements such affiliations will contribute to the algorithm.

Practo offers services such as Practo Search and Practo Ray. Practo Search is online directory of doctors. The search helps patient focused, unbiased and independent medical website with over 120,000 doctors across India and Singapore. Patients can look for an appointment with the doctor’s listed on the Practo’s website.

Practo Ray is practice management software that takes care from patient contact to patient records. All the information about the patients will be stored and the staff or the doctor can access them anytime, anywhere. The software creates personalized medical profiles for each patient. With complete patient profile, a doctor at a glance will come to know about medical history, lifestyle habits and personal information.

Practo Ray is dynamic to add additional information with unique identification number. Doctors can add another person of the family in the records and send personalized messages for follow ups, birthday wishes.

All the medical records are stored electronically. All Practo servers are hosted adhered to HIPAA compliance inside Amazon Cloud with additional backups in place. The software handles entire management of the clinic or hospital. It will generate necessary reports with income and expenditure break up, consultants and treatment type. Reports are auto generated and will provide deeper insights of the practice that doctor currently owns.

The software is enabled to provide prescriptions, bills, treatment plans and case sheets. It removes the cumbersome process to provide treatment history along with discharge summary and further follow-ups. The information will be given in neat and presentable manner.

Practo Ray app can be downloaded on iOS and Google Play helpful to doctors. They can carry the practice with them wherever they are. Doctors can shoot the images of the X-rays and upload to the patient’s profile. Doctors can organize the appointment schedule and further make follow up calls.

Practo.com provides reliable support in terms of suggestions and training. The company assists the practitioner in migrating the data and train the staff of doctor. After subscription of Practo Ray, all the upgrades of the software are provided free. In case of assistance, a comprehensive support team provide detailed guides and assist the doctor or staff on phone, email or live chat.

In India, Practo.com gets more than 500,000 hits each month. Around 1,500 appointments are fixed on day to day basis. The company is expecting to receive more than 2,000,000 each month in next few months. Practo operates in Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Hyderabad and Chennai and has started the operations to cater in Singapore. The current lists of doctors on the Practo are more than 120,000 spread across 100 cities in India. 80% of the listed doctors are from the metros like Delhi, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Pune, Bangalore and Chennai.

Singapore Operations of Practo is gaining momentum in terms of daily appointment thru the company website pegging more than 500 appointments per day.

Practo.com earns money by sales of Practo Ray software services to doctors and charges the doctors to appear on top of searches. As said earlier, the company has developed an app in iOS and Android environments. Currently they are receiving 30% traffic from the mobile internet and applications.
The Bangalore based company was founded in 2008. The idea of starting the company hit Shashank when his father was in need of knee surgery. It became very difficult to find a doctor for second opinion also faced difficulty to scan and send the reports and supporting documents in the US.

Practo Technologies was started by Shashank ND and Abhinav Lal. Shashank ND is the Co Founder & Chief Executive Officer of Practo. He has done his graduation in Bachelor of Technology from National Institute of Technology, Suratkal, Karnataka. He did his schooling from National Public School. On the professional front, he was coordinator and Joint convener of E-FOREA is an organisation for students to realize their entrepreneurial potential in them. He is the founder circle member of ISPIRT Foundation.

Abhinav Lal is another Co Founder and Chief Technology Officer of Practo. He is graduated from National Institute of Technology, Suratkal, Karnataka in Bachelor of Technology. He is a member of Engineers’ Forum of Entrepreneurship Awareness.

Practo Technology has employee strength of 600 employees and the numbers is expected to get increased to 1,500 by December 2015.

Practo Technology received several rounds of funding till date. The company received $4 million from Sequoia Capital in 2012 as Series ‘A’ funding. They received additional funding of $20 million from the same investor as Series ‘B’ during 2014. Practo wants to extend its reach into other countries especially in Asia Pacific Region and Mid Asia region.

Practo Technology received $30 million funding from Matrix and Sequoia Capital yesterday. The funding is termed as largest in the digital health care biz till now outside the US.

The company has direct competition from other startups such as Lybrate, Helpingdoc and Ziffi. These companies have recently funded by venture capitalists, however Practo’s funding put the company in forefront of online medical business. We will cover developments and funding of these companies in next few days.

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